Shameful files! BBC claims Deloitte helped Abramovich hide fortune and dodge tax
A BBC Panorama investigation has landed with explosive force. The programme claims that Deloitte, the world's biggest accountancy firm, helped falsify documents to hide the wealth of Roman Abramovich, the former Chelsea owner, and to evade tax on an industrial scale.
Details: The joint investigation by BBC Panorama and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based on a leak of thousands of documents, centres on Cyprus, where the oligarch's fortune was administered by the corporate services firm MeritServus, owned by Deloitte until 2005 and closely aligned with it afterwards. When Cyprus introduced a transparency law in 2006 that threatened to expose Abramovich's wealth, his advisers and MeritServus arranged to move the assets of Amiscan Investments to its parent company in the British Virgin Islands, with the transfer documents backdated to 2003. Deloitte Cyprus reviewed the backdated paperwork, judged it 'adequate', and signed off accounts from which $672 million (some £508 million) in luxury assets disappeared, leaving just $75,000 in the company after the 2006 sign-off. The hidden assets included a mansion in West Sussex, a London flat, an estate in the south of France, private jets, helicopters and a small fleet of boats, including the $147.5 million superyacht Pelorus. The investigation further alleges that MeritServus, after a meeting with Deloitte, drew up plans for Kravin Investments, which held almost $2 billion in Cypriot bank accounts, creating backdated documents to make it appear the company merely held and invested the funds on behalf of its BVI parent, thereby avoiding Cypriot tax on interest income. A third set of falsified records concerned Electus Investments, which held more than $10 billion of Abramovich's business fortune. Barrister Andrew Mitchell KC told the BBC the evidence showed 'straightforward' tax evasion that 'couldn't be more blatant', while accounting professor Lord Sikka said backdating transactions and publishing inaccurate accounts could constitute a breach of statutory duty.
The implications extend far beyond one oligarch. For English football, the story reopens the file on how Abramovich's billions built the Chelsea that won five Premier League titles and two Champions Leagues between 2003 and 2022, before sanctions after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced the club's sale. Abramovich, who is believed to be living in Turkey, is already the subject of a four-year criminal investigation in Jersey, where £5.4 billion of his assets remain frozen, and his lawyers told Panorama the Jersey probe was 'undertaken for political purposes.' His legal team categorically denied the tax allegations, insisting he was not involved in the day-to-day operation of the companies, did not know about, authorise or instruct the falsification of any document, and that relying on advice from professional advisers was 'entirely proper and legitimate.' Deloitte Cyprus said it acts in compliance with applicable laws and declined to comment on the specifics because the documents are more than 20 years old and no longer accessible.
It's worth noting that the investigators argue the case exposes the machinery that serviced an entire class of oligarchs: for every Abramovich, they say, there is an army of Western financial, legal and public relations firms willing, for a fee, to whitewash reputations and bend professional rules, with MeritServus and Deloitte presented as a textbook case of professionals willing to create documents to order.
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Miguel Solomons
Dailysports's expert
